Tag: Reviews

While the bulk of attention on TSMC is aimed at its leading-edge nodes, such as N3E and N2, loads of chips will continue to be made using more mature and proven process technologies for years to come. Which is why TSMC has continued to refine its existing nodes, including its current-generation 5nm-class offerings. To that end, at its North American Technology Symposium 2024, the company introduced a new, optimized 5nm-class node: N4C. TSMC's N4C process belongs to the company's 5nm-class family of fab nodes and is a superset of N4P, the most advanced technology in that family. In a bid to further bring down 5nm manufacturing costs, for TSMC is implementing several changes for N4C, including rearchitecting their standard cell and SRAM cell

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. provided several important updates about its upcoming process technologies at its North American Technology Symposium 2024. At a high level, TSMC's 2 nm plans remain largely unchanged: the company is on track to start volume production of chips on it's first-generation GAAFET N2 node in the second half of 2025, and N2P will succeed N2 in late 2026 – albeit without the previously-announced backs

With the arrival of spring comes showers, flowers, and in the technology industry, TSMC's annual technology symposium series. With customers spread all around the world, the Taiwanese pure play foundry has adopted an interesting strategy for updating its customers on its fab plans, holding a series of symposiums from Silicon Valley to Shanghai. Kicking off the series every year – and giving us our first real look at TSMC's updated foundry plans for the coming years – is the Santa Clara stop, where yesterday the company has detailed several new technologies, ranging from more advanced lithography processes to massive, wafer-scale chip packing options. Today we're publishing several stories based on TSMC's different offerings, starting with TSMC's marquee announcement: their A16 process node. Meanwhile, for the rest of our symposium stories, please be sure to check out the related reading below, and check back for additional stories.

Seagate Technology has reportedly notified its customers abouts its plans to raise prices on new hard drive orders and for demands that exceed prior agreements, echoing a similar move by Western Digital, which increased its prices earlier this month. These changes come in response to a surge in demand for high-capacity HDDs and constraints in supply due to decreased production capabilities of both Seagate and Western Digital, reports TrendForce. According to industry insights reported by TechNews, the sector anticipates that the scarcity of high-capacity HDD products will persist throughout the current quarter and possibly extend over the entire year. It is forecasted that HDD

As Qualcomm prepares for the mid-year launch of their forthcoming Snapdragon X SoCs for PCs, and the eagerly anticipated Oryon CPU cores within, the company is finally shoring up their official product plans, and releasing some additional technical details in the process. Thus far the company has been demonstrating their Snapdragon X Elite SoC in its highest-performing, fully-enabled configuration. But the retail Snapdragon X Elite will not be a single part; instead, Qualcomm is preparing a whole range of chip configurations for various price/performance tiers in the market. Altogether, there will be 3 Snapdragon X Elite SKUs that differ in CPU and GPU performance. As well, the company is introducing a second Snapdragon X tier, Snapdragon X Plus, for those SKUs positioned below the Elite performance tier. As of today, this will be a single configuration. But if the Snapdragon X lineup is successful and demand warrants it, I would not be surprised to see Qualcomm expand it fu

As Seagate ramps up shipments of its new heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR)-based Mozaic 3+ hard drive platform, the company is both in the enviable position of shipping the first major new hard drive technology in a decade, and the much less enviable position of proving the reliability of the first major new hard drive technology in a decade. Due to HAMR's use of temporal heating with its platters, as well as all-new read/write heads, HAMR introduces multiple new changes at once that have raise questions about how reliable the technology will be. Looking to address these matters (and further promote their HAMR drives),

Samsung Electronics has started mass production of its 9th generation of V-NAND memory. The first dies based on their latest NAND tech come in a 1 Tb capacity using a triple-level cell (TLC) architecture, with data transfer rates as high as 3.2 GT/s. The new 3D TLC NAND memory will initially be used to build high-capacity and high-performance SSDs, which will help to solidify Samsung's position in the storage market. Diving right in, Samsung is conspicuously avoiding to list the number of layers in their latest generation NAND, which is the principle driving factor in increasing capacity generation-on-generation. The company's current 8th gen V-NAND is 236 layers – similar to its major competitors – and word on

Lexar has a long history of serving the flash-based consumer storage market in the form of SSDs, memory cards, and USB flash drives. After having started out as a Micron brand, the company was acquired by Longsys which has diversified its product lineup with regular introduction of new products. Recently, the company announced a number of portable SSDs targeting different market segments. The Lexar SL500 Portable SSD is one of the moderately priced 20 Gbps PSSDs in that set. The SL500 is able to achieve its price point thanks to the use of a native USB flash controller - the Silicon Motion SM2320. The unique aspect is the use of YMTC 3D TLC NAND (compared to the usual Micron or BiCS NAND that we have seen in previous SM2320-based PSSDs). Read on for a detailed look at the SL500, including an analysis of its internals and evaluation of its performance consistency, power consumption, and thermal profile.

While desktop PC power supplies receive the bulk of enthusiasts’ attention for good reasons – not the least of which being the vast selection of options that comes from being a standardized part – power supplies as a whole aren’t just a concern for big PCs. With the majority of PC sales having flipped to notebook sales some years ago, notebook power supplies already lead the market in volume. And while most laptops don’t need the kind of massively powered PSUs that dominate the desktop space, even that is slowly changing as desktop replacement-class laptops increasingly grow in performance and power consumption. Perhaps the poster-child for the high-performance, high-powered laptop is Eurocom, who has a long history of developing heavy-duty DTR laptops that are all but portable desktop systems. Following recent trends in GPU power consumption and in GPU popularity for both gaming and AI workloads, the company has been selling a range

When JEDEC released its DDR5 specification (JESD79) back in 2020, the standard setting organization defined precise specs for modules with speed bins of up to 6400 MT/s, while leaving the spec open to further expansions with faster memory as technology progressed. Now, a bit more than three-and-a-half years later, and the standards body and its members are gearing up to release a faster generation of DDR5 memory, which is being laid out in the newly updated JESD79-JC5 specification. The latest iteration of the DDR5 spec defines official DDR timing specifications up to 8800 MT/s, as well as adding some new features when it comes to security.